For Pedro Cevallos-Candau, president of the Rotary Club of Chicago, work can be a zoo.
For Pedro Cevallos-Candau, work sometimes means monkey business. Several years ago, the civil engineer and his team designed the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems for the Regenstein Center for African Apes at Chicago’s 147-year-old Lincoln Park Zoo. Among the challenges: engineering the building’s airflow so its primate inhabitants wouldn’t pick up germs from visitors. “You have half a million people visiting the gorillas, so the possibility of a human contaminating a gorilla is much higher than the other way around,” Cevallos-Candau says. As the co-founder, president, and CEO of Primera, an engineering design and consulting firm, Cevallos-Candau also has overseen the creation of the zoo’s new Regenstein Macaque Forest, the modernization of O’Hare airport, and the renovation of Rush University Medical Center’s outpatient cancer facility. And as president of the Rotary Club of Chicago, he has plans including a project to bring surgical services to remote areas of his native Ecuador via a mobile medical unit, housed in a truck small and nimble enough to traverse rough rural roads. His primary goal for the club is a simple one: “I want to get everybody involved in something.” – Anne Ford